by Joe Schuster
Outside, the sky was darkening, perhaps rain moving in. Indeed, after a moment, sporadic drops were splashing against his windows and then a full-blown storm was lashing the glass. Lightning brightened the sky and seconds later thunder cracked. He stripped off his clothes, turned on the shower and, after he finished, dressed and went downstairs for his last dinner in another country.
Chapter Six
The lobby swarmed with men in dark suits and women in formal dresses: a wedding party crowding into the hotel, drenched from the rain, shaking out umbrellas that sprayed everyone, their shoes leaving dark spots on the carpet. The men and women were giddy: the storm would become a story the bride and groom would tell for long thereafter. Twenty years from then, with the way stories grew, maybe they would describe their reception as a party in the midst of God’s fury.
On his crutches, Edward Everett had difficulty navigating through the mass of people. A stocky middle-aged man in a brown tuxedo too snug for his girth shoved past him, nearly bowling him over. A tiny woman in a silver floor-length gown trailing him, her hand gripping the crook of his elbow, apologized, cringing. A small girl wearing a white pinafore and white patent-leather shoes banged into his left crutch, causing him to stumble; she fell into a heap on the carpet, crying. A woman swooped in behind her and, gripping her by the wrist, yanked her to her feet. The girl wailed, “I don’t wanna.”
“Oh, yes, you wanna,” the woman said through clenched teeth. They swept off with the rest of the wedding party toward one of the ballrooms down a long corridor.
There were two restaurants off the lobby: the coffee shop where he’d eaten his breakfast on so many mornings and a more formal one. It was this latter one where he wanted to have his last meal in Canada, a place the guidebook Julie had picked up at the airport on her arrival said featured one of the best steaks in the city. The dining room was far fancier than anyplace he’d ever eaten in his life. The lighting was subdued and the room seemed darker still because the walls were a deep mahogany paneling. Patrons filled roughly half the tables, speaking in quiet tones. Even their gestures were reverential—the way they picked up a silver knife to butter a roll or laid salad forks onto the plate. He stood at the entrance for a moment, separated from the dining room by a burgundy velvet rope. At a podium on the other side of the rope, a tuxedoed maitre d’ spoke into a phone, his brow furrowed, flipping through the pages of a register. “Impossible, impossible,” he was saying in a quiet yet firm tone. When he glanced up, Edward Everett gave him a look that he hoped the man would perceive as understanding: clearly the person on the other end of the call was being difficult. Instead of giving him some sign he appreciated the support, he frowned and resumed leafing through the book. When he hung up, he approached Edward Everett.
“Oui?”
“I’d like a table.”
“A table?”
“Yes. For dinner.”
“I’m sorry. There is nothing,” the man said, gesturing to the dining room behind him. In a far corner, a man who had been eating a solitary dinner while reading The Wall Street Journal folded it neatly into thirds, stood, pushed his chair snug against the table and left.
“But …”
“I’m sorry, monsieur. We are booked.”
“There are empty—”
“I assure you, sir. Our reservations are full. Besides …” He held out his right hand toward Edward Everett. “Your attire.”
Edward Everett glanced at his clothing: khaki slacks and a paisley long-sleeved shirt.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the maitre d’ said. His focus shifted from Edward Everett as if he had dismissed him from his consciousness. “Yes, sir?” he said.
“Ellison, four,” a man behind Edward Everett said.
“Oh, yes, Mr. Ellison. Good to see you again, sir,” the maitre d’ said, and the party of four swept past Edward Everett as the maitre d’ unhooked the velvet rope: three men in their fifties and a dainty, elderly woman; the men in suits and ties, the woman in a lilac dress with a lace collar that rose high on her neck. They followed the maitre d’ to a table. He was an entirely different man with Ellison, party of four; he seemed to shrink a bit in his deference.
“Money,” a woman said from behind him.
Edward Everett turned. “Excuse me?”
“Money,” she said. “It makes me sick.” She was somewhere in her forties, he guessed, nearly as tall as he was, wearing a silver floor-length dress. Her red hair was in tight curls, a white orchid tucked behind her left ear. He noticed she was in stocking feet. A pair of slender-strapped silver high heels dangled from her right hand, rainwater dripping onto the burgundy carpet.
“Ever wear heels?” she said, holding her shoes out to him.
“No,” he said.
“Avoid it.”
“I’ll check it off my list,” he said.
“I’m a refugee,” she said.
“From what?”
“Wedded bliss. My little sister’s, not my own.”
Edward Everett realized she had been drinking; her breath carried the smell of some slightly sweet alcoholic beverage.
“May I help madam?” the maitre d’ said from behind Edward Everett.
“Technically, it’s mademoiselle,” the woman said. “Much to my mother’s horror.”
“Does mademoiselle have a reservation?”
“I have many reservations,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“Reservations about the wisdom of white after Labor Day. Reservations about supporting either presidential candidate. In my country, not yours. You don’t have a president. You have that man with the weak chin who has the wife everyone says is so beautiful although I don’t see it. Tell me, Mr. Crutches, don’t you think I’m more beautiful than what’s-her-name?” She struck a pose, tilting her chin up, laying her left hand on the back of her head, and smiled, showing teeth that were nearly perfect save for her right upper canine, which had a small chip in it.
Edward Everett had no idea what she was talking about. “I’m sorry, but—”
“Perhaps madam and sir—”
“Mademoiselle,” the woman said with a surprising fierceness.
“Mademoiselle,” the maitre d’ said, giving a clearly obsequious smile. “Perhaps you would be more comfortable in our less formal dining room. I can have someone escort you there.” He lifted a finger and almost immediately a bellhop stood beside the woman. “I am afraid we cannot accommodate mademoiselle and monsieur,” the maitre d’ said. “Perhaps you can show them to the Salon de Jardin.”
“Certainly,” the bellhop said. He was a squat man with what Edward Everett’s mother called a “drinker’s nose,” the cartilage thick, the skin red and pockmarked.
“We’re not—” Edward Everett tried to say.
“Are you throwing us out?” the woman said.
“Please, madam.”
“Moiselle. Mademoiselle,” she said.
The maitre d’ gave her another obsequious grin. Edward Everett wondered if he was deliberately taunting her.
“I have never—” she said.
Behind her, a half-dozen people waited for the maitre d’: a mother and father and two well-dressed sets of twins, the boys in navy blazers with gold buttons decorated with ships’ anchors, blond hair in crew cuts that matched their father’s; the girls in black-and-white polka-dotted dresses, their hair held back in identical polka-dotted ribbons.
“Maybe we’d …” Edward Everett said, nodding toward the bellhop.
“Yes, sir?” the maitre d’ said to the family behind them, Edward Everett and the woman in the silver dress already in his own personal past tense, his hand on the clip securing the velvet rope to its stanchion in anticipation of another acceptable party.
“Dr. Whitson and family,” the man said, stepping forward and around Edward Everett and the woman.
“Yes, Dr. Whitson,” the maitre d’ said.
“Sir?” the bellhop said to Edward Everett, one eyebrow raised in invita
tion.
He followed the bellhop to the smaller dining room, although he knew where it was. “Two for dinner,” the bellhop said to the hostess seated behind the desk at the entrance, reading a paperback romance novel.
She sighed, closed the book after folding down a corner of the page she was reading, slid off her stool, plucked two menus from the desk and walked off into the dining room, not even waiting for any sort of acknowledgment from either Edward Everett or the woman who was, inexplicably, following him and the hostess toward a table in a far corner. She seated herself in one of the chairs while Edward Everett maneuvered himself into the other, laying his crutches on the floor and nudging them under the table.
“War wound?” the woman said, shoving the stainless ware off the napkin folded on the table in front of her and laying the napkin on her lap.
“I’m sorry,” Edward Everett said, “but—”
“Look,” she said. “You were going to eat alone. I was going to eat alone, and …” She gave a little shrug, closing her eyes. Edward Everett couldn’t tell, but it seemed she was trying to suppress tears. She took in a deep breath and opened her eyes. “We don’t have to talk. Hell, look at most of the rest of the couples here: they’re not talking.”
Edward Everett glanced around the dining room. At one table, a man made notes in a pocket notebook while the woman with him sorted through her purse as if she was looking for something, laying keys and wadded tissue on the tabletop. At another table, the woman looked up from her plate expectantly toward the man, giving him a small smile. In return, he briefly glanced at her and then looked down at his lap.
“It’s fine,” Edward Everett said, and opened the menu. He felt uncomfortable sitting with the woman; she was older than he was by clearly more than a decade and, although he told himself he would never see any of the people in the restaurant again and would, at this time the next day, be back in Ohio, he hoped they didn’t think he and the woman were a couple: perhaps mother and son, or older sister and younger brother, but not together.
“What is it with men?” The woman closed her menu, slapping it onto the table with enough force that it jangled the flatware.
“What are you talking about?” Edward Everett said quietly. At the next table, two elderly women paused in their own conversation and were studying the two of them.
“I’m not hideous,” she said.
“No,” Edward Everett said carefully.
“You’re thinking, ‘I hope they don’t think she’s with me.’ ”
“No,” he said.
“It’s coming off you like an odor. ‘She’s old.’ ”
“I don’t even know you,” he said. “I just came downstairs to have dinner on my last night here. You followed me.”
The woman held up her hand. “Please.”
“Just don’t—”
“Make any more scenes?”
“Yes,” he said.
She raised her right hand in a scout salute: thumb and pinky circled, her other three fingers up. “I swear.”
Hoping it was as good as the steak for which the restaurant on the other side of the lobby was famous, he ordered a sirloin, medium, and a baked potato. The woman surprised him by ordering the same, except medium-rare, and asked for an extra portion of sour cream for the potato. “And a carafe of your house red,” she said. “Wine?” she asked Edward Everett.
“Sure,” he said.
“Two glasses, then,” she said.
They sat in silence, waiting for their meals. Edward Everett stole a look at the woman, who seemed lost in her thoughts. She stared vacantly at a far corner of the room, tapping a tooth with a long fingernail that was polished a deep red. When she was younger, she was probably beautiful, he thought. Her features were surprisingly delicate; her nose was thin, as were her lips; her makeup was careful in a way that made it appear natural, but as he studied her, he could see it covered wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and creases on her forehead.
“So,” she said, startling him. “A six or a seven? At least a five.”
“What?”
“You’ve been staring at me for two minutes. You’re trying to decide whether I’m pretty enough. I know I don’t rate a nine and certainly not a ten—even when I was your age—but come on, you have to give me a five.”
Edward Everett blushed. “I wasn’t—” he stammered.
“Okay,” she said.
The waitress brought their wine and salads and the woman began shoving the tomato wedges to the edge of her plate. “What’s your name?” she asked, lifting a bite of lettuce to her mouth.
“Edward Everett,” he said.
“Well, Mr. Everett, I’m Estelle Herron. Two ‘r’s,’ not one like the bird.”
He considered telling her that “Edward Everett” was his first and middle name but for the first time in his life it struck him that it was odd he was “Edward Everett” and not “Edward” or even “Ed.” She would ask how he got the name and he would have to tell her about his mother’s affection for Edward Everett Horton, admitting that he’d been named for a Hollywood second banana few remembered anymore. He let it go: what did it matter? Once the meal was over, he’d be back upstairs in his room, away from a woman he still doubted was entirely sane.
“What brings you to Montreal?” she said, giving the city’s name a pronunciation that sounded expertly French.
“I was playing ball,” he said.
“Like that?” she said, indicating his cast with her fork, Russian dressing dripping from its tines onto the tablecloth.
“No,” he said. “I got hurt a few weeks ago and the team moved on while I was in the hospital. My season’s over.” Maybe my career, he thought.
“Left behind,” she said. “That makes two of us.” She set down her fork, picked up the carafe of wine, poured them each a glass, lifted hers, tilting its rim toward him, an offer of a toast. He picked up his glass and touched it to hers, then took a sip. He was never a wine drinker—not dinner wines, at least. Whenever he drank wine, it was what he and his friends called “alcoholic Kool-Aid”: highly sweet apple and strawberry flavors. This was bitter and he suppressed a cough, not wanting to show her he lacked sophistication.
“So, what school do you play for, Mr. Everett?”
“Not a school,” he said. “The Cardinals.”
“Really?” she said. “You wouldn’t try to fool a girl, would you?”
“No.”
“I don’t remember any Everett playing for them.”
“I’ve been with the team since July,” he said. “I got called up—I was in Springfield.” Could it really have been that long ago: the month before last?
“Not an auspicious start,” she said, and then went on almost immediately. “I’m sorry. I apologize. I have a tendency to—a lot of smarts, my father used to say, but not a lick of social sense. May he rest in peace.” She picked up her wine and raised it slightly upwards. “How did you get hurt?”
He told her about the game weeks earlier, about the play that hurt him, but not about his performance at the plate, partly because he heard the account through her perception: to someone else, it would seem a baseball version of “the one that got away.” It didn’t count, but the game was thiiiiiiiiiis big.
“My father was a Cardinals fan.” She took another forkful of her salad but paused with the bite partway between her plate and her mouth, as if she was remembering someone. “I’m not from here,” she said, taking the bite finally. “We’re from Indiana. Hoosiers, rah!” She raised a fist in a way that made him think of cheerleaders, and for a moment he could see her at sixteen, red-cheeked, giving a jump on the sidelines of a football game in November, bouncy with youthful excitement. He tried to calculate when that would have been.
“By rights, we should have been Cincinnati fans, but for some reason …” She gave a shrug. “When I was a little girl, my father and I—but you don’t want to hear this. We said silence.” She held up the scout salute again.
“
It’s all right,” he said. “You and your father …”
“You don’t have to,” she said, taking another forkful of lettuce and then inspecting it as if it were something distasteful, pulling a small brown and wilted leaf from the fork and laying it delicately on the edge of her plate before eating the rest of the forkful.
“You and your father,” he said again.
“We would sit up listening to Cardinals games on the Philco. The reception wasn’t always clear. We’d get overlap, you know, from other stations. My mother would say, ‘Howard, the girl has to get her sleep.’ ‘There’s plenty of time for sleep after October,’ he’d say. He was my hero for that.”
The waitress brought their dinners but got the orders mixed up: when Edward Everett cut into his steak, a thin trail of blood pooled around the edges of his sirloin.
“Not very ladylike,” Estelle said, switching their plates. “To order meat so near to still being alive.” She went on with her story. “Even after he died, I kept on with it. It was my way to stay connected to him. I remember when I was just out of college, my mother wanted to take me to Paris. It was what women of a certain sort did after college. She’d done it with her mother and so she and I were going to damn well do it. We were not close, but one did not say ‘no’ to one’s mother. Not then.”
She got lost again for a moment in some thought but came back after a second. “I didn’t want to go. The Cardinals were still in the thick of things and I didn’t want to miss it. They had a chance to go to the Series for the first time since 1946 and I was damn well not going to miss it. She didn’t understand. It wasn’t the baseball, it was—”
“Your father.”
“Exactly. You understand that. She couldn’t. So we went; they were in first place the day we left and they weren’t anymore when we got back six weeks later.” She laughed. “It will sound stupid, but I blamed myself. If I’d been there, listening to the games, they’d’ve won. Silly, and maybe you can’t understand that. One afternoon, we were going to the Louvre and on the way we passed a newsstand where they had the International Herald Tribune; I bought one and, while we were waiting in line to get into the room to see the Mona Lisa, I read the sports page. It wasn’t much—just a paragraph about a game they had with someone, I don’t know: Cincinnati or New York. My mother snatched the paper out of my hands in front of all those people—a rare lapse in decorum for her—and snapped at me. ‘For God’s sake, Esty. We’re in the Louvre.’ She stepped out of line and marched the newspaper to a trash can and came back. I could tell the newsprint all over her hands bothered her. It made me think of Lady Macbeth—‘Out, damn spot’—the way she kept wiping one hand against the other to try to get them clean. The Cardinals ruined her trip to the Louvre.”